Tracksuit CEO

by Tracksuit CEO

Well it was fairly lazy mugging and it might even fall under the category of aggressive panhandling, but it certainly did disrupt my evening stroll and left me with a few things to think about. I was walking home on Friday evening from the bus stop about 4 blocks from my house. I live on a very busy street near downtown Austin and have never had any trouble in my neighborhood, but when I passed the little neighborhood convenience store I knew I was in for a lively exchange. Two young teenagers accosted me asking me for 75 cents. I told them I didn’t have any money for them. See, I didn’t want to lie because I did have money, it just wasn’t for them. My money is usually for my wife or my 2 daughters, I rarely give it to random teenage thugs. But these guys really needed that 75 cents so they could go and buy a cigar. Now, I’m a cigar aficionado myself so this might have been enough to persuade me but they then told me they wanted to buy a Swisher Sweet. A Swisher Sweet? There was no way the cigar snob in me was going to give them my hard-earned pocket change for a Swisher Sweet.

Aside from stopping and facing them (I didn’t really want to have my back turned to them) they hadn’t made any real progress. In business terms they had so far failed to sell me on their proposal. Sensing this was going nowhere, the shorter and wider of the two (I suppose he was the brawn of the outfit) informed me that if I didn’t give him 75 cents, he was going to rob the convenience store (he motioned behind him with his hand). Okay, this ultimatum was so preposterous that I had to rephrase it to him. “So you’re saying that if I don’t give you my money then you’re going to go and steal someone else’s money?”. Normally I would have cared about someone else getting robbed but the ’someone else’ in this situation were the friendly but well-armed Syrian guys who run the mini-mart. “Good luck pulling that one off guys”, I thought to myself.

What negotiating mistake did this amateur make? He circumvented the traditional “your money or your life” imperative and went for a less traditional “your money or someone else’s money” approach. Needless to say this didn’t work on me. After restating it to him he even shrugged as if to say, “well, I tried”. Now the brains of the operation stepped in with a less heavy-handed approach, “Come on, man. We need a blunt and we just need 75 cents.” Okay, now he’s appealing to my better nature and he’s not telling me the fabricated and overly-complicated sob story I’m accustomed to hearing, “…my kid is in a hotel and he’s hungry and my girl is down in San Antonio and my car’s out of gas so I just need bus fare so I can…..etc.” The guy needed a blunt, plain and simple, and for just 75 cents he would be happy and leave me alone. I don’t know if these guys were purposefully playing Good Cop, Bad Cop but they should have left the talking to the Good Cop.

So now the ball was in my court and I decided to stand there deliberating for an uncomfortably long amount of time, like when Jack Benny was given the choice between his money and his life and he replied, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” So here we were with several failed attempts on both of our parts to come to a mutual agreement. I knew it was up to me to make them the offer they couldn’t refuse. I reached into my pocket and while I would have preferred to have given them each the contents of a can of pepper spray instead I pulled out 27 cents. I had evaluated the party across the table from me and had discerned one characteristic or trait they both had in common, I was going to construct my final offer on this one assumption. My assumption was that they were both very lazy and when I threatened to throw the change all over the sidewalk if they didn’t back off of me they both reacted just as I knew they would. “No don’t do that”, said one of them. The other said, “Be cool, man. Just hand it to me, don’t throw it!”

I ended up handing it to one of them, then to make sure that I had the last word, I pointed one parental finger at them and ended our little negotiation with some advice. All I could muster was, “Be good”.

I’ve always heard that sometimes the best negotiations are the ones you walk away from. I guess it could also be said that some of the best negotiations are the ones you walk away from still holding onto your wallet.